Willow Creek. The
whitewashed walls gleaming through its festoons of Virginia creeper,
a little lawn bordered with beds filled with hollyhocks, larkspur,
sweet-william and other old-fashioned flowers and flanked by a heavy
border of gorgeous towering sunflowers, gave a general air, not only
of comfort and thrift, but of refinement as well, too seldom found in
connection with the raw homesteads of the new western country.

At a little distance from the house, at the end of a lane leading
through the bluff, were visible the stables, granary and other
outhouses, with corral attached.

Within, the house fulfilled the promise of its external appearance
and surroundings. There was dignity without stiffness, comfort without
luxury, simplicity without any suggestion of the poverty that painfully
obtrudes itself.

At the open window whose vine shade at once softened the light and
invited the summer airs, sat Mrs. Gwynne, with her basket of mending
at her side. Eight years of life on an Alberta ranch had set their mark
upon her. The summers' suns and winters' frosts and the eternal summer
and winter winds had burned and browned the soft, fair skin of her
earlier days. The anxieties inevitable to the struggle with poverty had
lined her face and whitened her hair. But her eyes shone still with the
serene light of a soul that carries within it the secret of triumph over
the carking cares of life.

Seated beside her was her eldest daughter Kathleen, sewing; and
stretched upon the floor lay Nora, frankly idle and half asleep,
listening to the talk of the other two. Their talk turned upon the theme
never long absent from their thought--that of ways and means.

"Tell you what, Mummie," droned Nora, lazily extending her lithe young
body to its utmost limits, "there is a simple way out of our never
ending worries, namely, a man, a rich man, if handsome, so much the
better, but rich he must be, for Kathleen. They say they are hanging
round the Gateway City of the West in bunches. How about it, Kate?"

"My dear Nora," gently chided her mother, "I wish you would not talk in
that way. It is not quite nice. In my young days--"

"In your young days I know just exactly what happened, Mother. There
was always a long queue of eligible young men dangling after the awfully
lovely young Miss Meredith, and before she was well out of her teens the
gallant young Gwynne carried her off."

"We never talked about those things, my dear," said her